Chapter 201: 201
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Devon rolled his eyes. "Right... the key is evil. The key is dangerous. The key will eat your souuuul."
"No. The key is neutral and uncaring about you. It IS dangerous. And it will eat little bits of everything about you, including your life and souuuul. One little nip at a time. You won't even notice that much until you're FUBAR." Al shot back.
Making themselves comfortable, Devon continued, "You know. If I remember right, you told me you didn't know anything about IT. You just kinda knew what it did. All of a sudden, you're an expert."
Al said, "I know a little more everyday about all kinds of stuff I didn't before, Devon. Do you have a point?"
Deshawn said, "What I think is that you're holding out on us and I wonder how much more would shake out if you were shook up."
Al's eyes flickered dimly with an ethereal glow. "Even if I was, in what way is me holding anything from you something I'm not entitled to do? I don't owe you anything."
Deshawn chuckled and said, "Don't get it twisted. We just want to step it up. If you got more heat, we want to know so we can do bigger and better things with it."
Al said, "I'm not interested in bigger and better things. I'm interested in safety and survivability. The little things Devon did got your boy shot and him minutes away from a long, painful end... And you want to bite off more!? Try handling what you got first. Better yet, get the f*** out of my house and don't show up in front of me again until you know what respect means. I've done nothing but help you and this is what I'm dealing with!?"
Deshawn stood up, swaggering to the door. "Don't forget that we know about you... It's alright, Devon. You don't need him. I got you."
The young man didn't look so convinced. Whatever power play that Deshawn was trying to pull, it was meant to pull his little brother closer and away from Al. Underneath it all, Devon already knew he'd made a mistake and didn't know how to get out of it.
Thinking fast, Devon said, "Brother... Man, look. Did you know where I was and what was happening to me or was it him? Where you been the last few days? You look better than I've seen you in years, man. What the hell are you doing punking Al like that?"
The older brother turned to Devon and said, "He don't give a sh*t about you. He just needs a dumb n*gga to do the hard sh*t for him while he sits back here all safe. He said it himself."
When Al saw Deshawn start stomping his way, he pulled out the 'ever sharp' blade and pointed it without so much as a tremor at Deshawn's throat. "Leave and we can still be friendly after we both have some time to cool down. Take one more step forward and we won't have that option anymore. Get out."
Deshawn shrugged off Devon's hand that was trying to pull him back and turned away after mean mugging Al for all he was worth.
"Can you believe this f***ing white dude? He pulled a sword on me. A sword! Who uses a damn sword anymore?" Deshawn's voice reached back to him as Devon's lowered voice tried to talk his brother down.
Whatever it was that had let Al stand calmly in front of nearly 300lbs of muscle and barely suppressed rage, left him along with the adrenaline.
"I think I need to take exercise a little more seriously. I wasn't designed for this kind of freaking stress," he muttered to himself.
Over the next couple of weeks, he'd check on them every once in awhile. They actually weren't doing bad for themselves and Deshawn actually had a lot better control over his actions than Al thought he would. He just about popped a gasket two days after their little tiff when he went to fill his car up only for his card to be denied.
By the time he got home to find out what happened, the 300 in his checking account and the 8000 he had in his savings had been removed and returned with a few thousand more added like it was an apology. Grumbling, he backtracked to the gas station and took care of his other business before returning home. The rest of that evening, he went over the things he had seen while spying on them with the key and made some suggestions with detailed layouts.
Afterwards he sent it with a scanned PDF attachment of a receipt for paid consultation fees. Towards the end of the second week, he sent another and responded to some of the more insulting criticisms that Deshawn leveled at him. To balance it out, Al admitted that the man was a great deal more level headed than he had originally thought and apologized for his initial view flavored heavily by how they had gotten to know each other.
He didn't really feel like offering an olive branch to the the man who had constantly badmouthed him but he recognized that quite a bit of Deshawn's shoulder chip came from misplaced pride. It didn't help that the man came from a background dealing with people who saw things like apologies and compromise as weakness. If the warning that he could see what they were up to mixed with a willingness to bury the hatchet wasn't enough to turn Deshawn around, Al had no problems turning the tables and letting the man see what being an unreasonable prick would get him.
A few days later, an event happened that hadn't happened in awhile. One of the low dimensional shadows died. A few, in fact. It only really felt like one because of how they died. They had climbed.
Their experience had been nothing like Orison's romp through the abandoned astral home. They wandered in a strange and confusing place, desperately seeking any way back out. In the process, they had ran into and absorbed each other as a result of being drawn to the same 'thin spot'. Out of countless ones that they couldn't sense or lead to certain death, they had found one with a nice coastal scene on the other side.
The only problem was, as the newly fused shadow tumbled through the temporary gap in the fabric of reality and past the boundary crossing baptism, he had been too confused and muddleheaded to realize he was falling to his death from a great height in the air. As Al took in the force of their hard earned increase in existence, he felt a sense of difficult to describe melancholy. They had beat the odds long enough to transcend the limit they had started with only to be robbed at the first big milestone's finish line by a cruel twist of coincidence.
It was in no way a bad thing for the shadows to live long and productive lives. The more they earned, the more they brought to the joining afterwards. Were they to live on indefinitely, they might find themselves the inheritors rather than the donors but Al had to wonder if that part was actually true.
He didn't think it was a coincidence at all that he was the collector but even if the shadows couldn't take over that part, Al wondered if one of the other colors could. If that were true, he wondered if Red would come to 'kill' him under some misguided notion that it would make the survivor 'the one'. He certainly hoped not but, just in case, he was a great deal more generous with Green when sharing what he couldn't safely contain or absorb before useful things were lost.
He was slowly getting spiritually stronger and capable of handling more but that was far from a goal Al wanted to embrace. Foreign thoughts and feelings had slowly slipped in and been merging with him the whole time. He felt like he was on the verge of understanding something important but some vital piece of the puzzle was missing.
After he had calmed down enough to fall back asleep, Al wondered if people really could die from seeing their death in a falling dream. The lurch his heart went through certainly felt like it held the ability to stop a weak one. A person close to having a heart attack most certainly could trigger one from such a jolt. With that and other grim thoughts gamboling through his head like malicious sheep, he faded back into unremembered dreams.
The next day, he woke up with the feeling of melancholy not quite shaken off. After a nice cup of coffee, he felt better, if not completely chipper. When he used Presto to clean the coffee pot and the dishes, he made the discovery that his party favor squirt gun of a magic reserve had graduated to a dollar store water pistol. The magic channels that were sparse and feeble before were still sparse and feeble but stretched throughout his body rather than just a couple of fragile hairs that ran through the very basic head to heart to hand connection.
It was just enough for him to start storing a small amount of essence in his body or run the couple of seconds worth of healing ability it took to actually accomplish anything. Whether body essence storage or a couple seconds heal, his channels would need a break afterwards to recover or they very well could 'break'. Two thoughts were born from that realization. Gains from the shadows were almost entirely spiritual or intellectual in nature and anything else was mostly fluke chance.
More than ever, he rooted for the ones still struggling to 'make it' for as long as they could. No matter how much he feared too many joining him or sympathized with their plight, he couldn't share gains with them like he could Red and Green. He couldn't even actively reach for their connections in quite the same way.
Shaking himself free of those thoughts, he went through his morning routine. Under the new threats introduced into his life, he had decided to step up his exercise game even though he hated every moment of it. No matter how hard he tried to psych himself, every moment he spent doing it felt like a moment he could spend catching up on a web novel or a streaming series. There almost always was some kind of entertaining distraction trying to pull him away from it.
It made him feel a little crazy but it was almost like it was his job to grab inspiration, tease meaningful things from games and shows. He could believe there was some truth to that. And if so, he hadn't been doing that job very well. For a person bent on enjoying their life and far too aware of a greater picture, such things had lost a great deal of their appeal but escapism had become a heavily ingrained habit. The desire to procrastinate and relax was an old nemesis stretching back for as far as he could remember.
Having completed his morning torture and finishing it off with the catharsis of a hot shower to ease the aches, he checked out his noticeable progress with a flicker of narcissistic delight and posed in front of the mirror. That's when it hit him. There were other progresses that had nothing to do with his newly found fragile discipline.
The thinning hair on the top of his head was coming back in but it was much lighter than his own and not the occasional gray one he expected to see. A certain amount of 'extra' noticed in specific areas, that he had written off as the effect of dropping some pounds and getting more in shape, were more than he could justify with such a flimsy excuse anymore. There was a touch too much youthfulness to write off as clean living and the dark green eyes he had always thought of as one of his few redeeming features had a slight splash of blue close to the edge of either eye.
A sense of violated invasion washed over him before he got a grip and calmed down. It was a part of the inevitable he had to accept. Despite the slow creep of changes spreading across him, he was still recognizable as himself. And even if he wasn't thrilled about it, other than the eyes, he didn't have a reason to complain from an aesthetic point of view. Somehow, that made him a little angry for reasons he didn't feel comfortable in exploring.
Done for the day with a self inspection that would become an obsessive part of his morning routine, Al went to check the development of a new urban legend online. Ghost Dog of Chicory had it's own web page and a decent following. It even had a Metube channel with a couple of videos that sported several hundred thousand views. Eye witness testimony about the spectral hound created from Tait's scroll grew wilder and more detailed, taking on a life of its own.
With the faint understanding of faith and its associated abilities he had, Al wondered if the fervor created by the incident would actually create a kind of thought form that would continue haunting the area. Over the last couple of weeks, the incident had taken on a somewhat religious overtone. How the spectral hound had chased the kids and one small lady out of the house before wrecking the basement kitchen into exploding, had taken a 'protect the innocent, destroy evil' kind of vibe in the minds and hearts of people.
The only thing that rubbed him the wrong way beyond all the goodness inherent, was how ugly the treatment of one voice among the witness crowd was treated. A fourteen year old girl who lost her mother in the explosion, the one fatal casualty and a 'cook' for the 'kitchen', didn't have anything nice to say about the ghost dog so many others thought greatly of. She was a vocal spokesperson for the 'adversary', quick to point out flaws in other's perception and demonstrate that the incident wasn't some miracle but calculated revenge of some kind.
Despite being labeled cruelly with 'daughter of the devil' style ostracism, it didn't stop her from adding her voice to the narrative. She was cool, logical and had a belly full of hate for whoever was responsible for the death of her mother. She wasn't some idealist and knew what her mother was doing didn't contribute anything good to the world but she loved the woman who had made hard choices to care and provide for her.
Under the guise of shell accounts, he anonymously set up a 2,500 dollar, five year maturity college fund and some department store gift cards sent to her aunt's post office box. There would likely be some additional outpouring of subtle support from others mixed among the hate mail and he hoped his addition would help balance it out. He didn't particularly feel guilt for the girl's loss. It was more an acknowledgment of her pain and validation of her perspective.
It was a valuable lesson for Al, who had lived a rather mundane and mostly sheltered life. There was no black and white when it came to war, no matter the size. When there was loss, there would be victims. A man might be a great scourge but his children or the children of his supporters were no more or less innocent than the children of the 'heroes' lost in taking that scourge down.
There were better and worse ways to do things, however. The 'better' ways in this case, would have possibly ended with Devon being significantly harmed or killed for taking too long or provoking resistance from the enemy. There was a little regret that burned in the back of Al's mind but he didn't feel like he'd done anything he couldn't live with. Regardless, he wouldn't want to test that by meeting that girl or exposing himself to anymore of their personal story than he already had. He didn't trust his logical self to be able to stand firm against the emotional with White's addition to the mix.
Aside from tying up a few small loose ends from his 'explosive' night, Al looked into moving from his city apartment to a more rural area. With urban sprawl creeping its way up to and around local farming communities, it was difficult to find a nice little patch of private country without buying. Going a few more unconventional routes, he finally found a little Heritage Building listing that most home owners wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, nestled into the crook of a nature preserve that even further limited what could be done to and with the property.
5,000 dollars down on a low interest loan, two sneaky uses of the key and a meeting with a member of the Heritage Preservation Committee and he was ready to move in a couple of days. He was also down for a perceived debt of around 20,000 or more in emergency mandatory home repairs that had to match strict guidelines. He was fine with that. Even if the world required his magic to come from within every time unless it was ritual, he could squeeze out an occasional mend between his channels' resting times.
It took some doing and a little more of his once again dwindling account but he set up a work from home arraignment with the clinic and a post office box in another city among other small details. A less intuitive and more deductive reasoning told him that things weren't as calm as they seemed and his own situation would only grow more complicated in the future. He wasn't completely ready yet but he was getting there.
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Devon rolled his eyes. "Right... the key is evil. The key is dangerous. The key will eat your souuuul."
"No. The key is neutral and uncaring about you. It IS dangerous. And it will eat little bits of everything about you, including your life and souuuul. One little nip at a time. You won't even notice that much until you're FUBAR." Al shot back.
Making themselves comfortable, Devon continued, "You know. If I remember right, you told me you didn't know anything about IT. You just kinda knew what it did. All of a sudden, you're an expert."
Al said, "I know a little more everyday about all kinds of stuff I didn't before, Devon. Do you have a point?"
Deshawn said, "What I think is that you're holding out on us and I wonder how much more would shake out if you were shook up."
Al's eyes flickered dimly with an ethereal glow. "Even if I was, in what way is me holding anything from you something I'm not entitled to do? I don't owe you anything."
Deshawn chuckled and said, "Don't get it twisted. We just want to step it up. If you got more heat, we want to know so we can do bigger and better things with it."
Al said, "I'm not interested in bigger and better things. I'm interested in safety and survivability. The little things Devon did got your boy shot and him minutes away from a long, painful end... And you want to bite off more!? Try handling what you got first. Better yet, get the f*** out of my house and don't show up in front of me again until you know what respect means. I've done nothing but help you and this is what I'm dealing with!?"
Deshawn stood up, swaggering to the door. "Don't forget that we know about you... It's alright, Devon. You don't need him. I got you."
The young man didn't look so convinced. Whatever power play that Deshawn was trying to pull, it was meant to pull his little brother closer and away from Al. Underneath it all, Devon already knew he'd made a mistake and didn't know how to get out of it.
Thinking fast, Devon said, "Brother... Man, look. Did you know where I was and what was happening to me or was it him? Where you been the last few days? You look better than I've seen you in years, man. What the hell are you doing punking Al like that?"
The older brother turned to Devon and said, "He don't give a sh*t about you. He just needs a dumb n*gga to do the hard sh*t for him while he sits back here all safe. He said it himself."
When Al saw Deshawn start stomping his way, he pulled out the 'ever sharp' blade and pointed it without so much as a tremor at Deshawn's throat. "Leave and we can still be friendly after we both have some time to cool down. Take one more step forward and we won't have that option anymore. Get out."
Deshawn shrugged off Devon's hand that was trying to pull him back and turned away after mean mugging Al for all he was worth.
"Can you believe this f***ing white dude? He pulled a sword on me. A sword! Who uses a damn sword anymore?" Deshawn's voice reached back to him as Devon's lowered voice tried to talk his brother down.
Whatever it was that had let Al stand calmly in front of nearly 300lbs of muscle and barely suppressed rage, left him along with the adrenaline.
"I think I need to take exercise a little more seriously. I wasn't designed for this kind of freaking stress," he muttered to himself.
Over the next couple of weeks, he'd check on them every once in awhile. They actually weren't doing bad for themselves and Deshawn actually had a lot better control over his actions than Al thought he would. He just about popped a gasket two days after their little tiff when he went to fill his car up only for his card to be denied.
By the time he got home to find out what happened, the 300 in his checking account and the 8000 he had in his savings had been removed and returned with a few thousand more added like it was an apology. Grumbling, he backtracked to the gas station and took care of his other business before returning home. The rest of that evening, he went over the things he had seen while spying on them with the key and made some suggestions with detailed layouts.
Afterwards he sent it with a scanned PDF attachment of a receipt for paid consultation fees. Towards the end of the second week, he sent another and responded to some of the more insulting criticisms that Deshawn leveled at him. To balance it out, Al admitted that the man was a great deal more level headed than he had originally thought and apologized for his initial view flavored heavily by how they had gotten to know each other.
He didn't really feel like offering an olive branch to the the man who had constantly badmouthed him but he recognized that quite a bit of Deshawn's shoulder chip came from misplaced pride. It didn't help that the man came from a background dealing with people who saw things like apologies and compromise as weakness. If the warning that he could see what they were up to mixed with a willingness to bury the hatchet wasn't enough to turn Deshawn around, Al had no problems turning the tables and letting the man see what being an unreasonable prick would get him.
A few days later, an event happened that hadn't happened in awhile. One of the low dimensional shadows died. A few, in fact. It only really felt like one because of how they died. They had climbed.
Their experience had been nothing like Orison's romp through the abandoned astral home. They wandered in a strange and confusing place, desperately seeking any way back out. In the process, they had ran into and absorbed each other as a result of being drawn to the same 'thin spot'. Out of countless ones that they couldn't sense or lead to certain death, they had found one with a nice coastal scene on the other side.
The only problem was, as the newly fused shadow tumbled through the temporary gap in the fabric of reality and past the boundary crossing baptism, he had been too confused and muddleheaded to realize he was falling to his death from a great height in the air. As Al took in the force of their hard earned increase in existence, he felt a sense of difficult to describe melancholy. They had beat the odds long enough to transcend the limit they had started with only to be robbed at the first big milestone's finish line by a cruel twist of coincidence.
It was in no way a bad thing for the shadows to live long and productive lives. The more they earned, the more they brought to the joining afterwards. Were they to live on indefinitely, they might find themselves the inheritors rather than the donors but Al had to wonder if that part was actually true.
He didn't think it was a coincidence at all that he was the collector but even if the shadows couldn't take over that part, Al wondered if one of the other colors could. If that were true, he wondered if Red would come to 'kill' him under some misguided notion that it would make the survivor 'the one'. He certainly hoped not but, just in case, he was a great deal more generous with Green when sharing what he couldn't safely contain or absorb before useful things were lost.
He was slowly getting spiritually stronger and capable of handling more but that was far from a goal Al wanted to embrace. Foreign thoughts and feelings had slowly slipped in and been merging with him the whole time. He felt like he was on the verge of understanding something important but some vital piece of the puzzle was missing.
After he had calmed down enough to fall back asleep, Al wondered if people really could die from seeing their death in a falling dream. The lurch his heart went through certainly felt like it held the ability to stop a weak one. A person close to having a heart attack most certainly could trigger one from such a jolt. With that and other grim thoughts gamboling through his head like malicious sheep, he faded back into unremembered dreams.
The next day, he woke up with the feeling of melancholy not quite shaken off. After a nice cup of coffee, he felt better, if not completely chipper. When he used Presto to clean the coffee pot and the dishes, he made the discovery that his party favor squirt gun of a magic reserve had graduated to a dollar store water pistol. The magic channels that were sparse and feeble before were still sparse and feeble but stretched throughout his body rather than just a couple of fragile hairs that ran through the very basic head to heart to hand connection.
It was just enough for him to start storing a small amount of essence in his body or run the couple of seconds worth of healing ability it took to actually accomplish anything. Whether body essence storage or a couple seconds heal, his channels would need a break afterwards to recover or they very well could 'break'. Two thoughts were born from that realization. Gains from the shadows were almost entirely spiritual or intellectual in nature and anything else was mostly fluke chance.
More than ever, he rooted for the ones still struggling to 'make it' for as long as they could. No matter how much he feared too many joining him or sympathized with their plight, he couldn't share gains with them like he could Red and Green. He couldn't even actively reach for their connections in quite the same way.
Shaking himself free of those thoughts, he went through his morning routine. Under the new threats introduced into his life, he had decided to step up his exercise game even though he hated every moment of it. No matter how hard he tried to psych himself, every moment he spent doing it felt like a moment he could spend catching up on a web novel or a streaming series. There almost always was some kind of entertaining distraction trying to pull him away from it.
It made him feel a little crazy but it was almost like it was his job to grab inspiration, tease meaningful things from games and shows. He could believe there was some truth to that. And if so, he hadn't been doing that job very well. For a person bent on enjoying their life and far too aware of a greater picture, such things had lost a great deal of their appeal but escapism had become a heavily ingrained habit. The desire to procrastinate and relax was an old nemesis stretching back for as far as he could remember.
Having completed his morning torture and finishing it off with the catharsis of a hot shower to ease the aches, he checked out his noticeable progress with a flicker of narcissistic delight and posed in front of the mirror. That's when it hit him. There were other progresses that had nothing to do with his newly found fragile discipline.
The thinning hair on the top of his head was coming back in but it was much lighter than his own and not the occasional gray one he expected to see. A certain amount of 'extra' noticed in specific areas, that he had written off as the effect of dropping some pounds and getting more in shape, were more than he could justify with such a flimsy excuse anymore. There was a touch too much youthfulness to write off as clean living and the dark green eyes he had always thought of as one of his few redeeming features had a slight splash of blue close to the edge of either eye.
A sense of violated invasion washed over him before he got a grip and calmed down. It was a part of the inevitable he had to accept. Despite the slow creep of changes spreading across him, he was still recognizable as himself. And even if he wasn't thrilled about it, other than the eyes, he didn't have a reason to complain from an aesthetic point of view. Somehow, that made him a little angry for reasons he didn't feel comfortable in exploring.
Done for the day with a self inspection that would become an obsessive part of his morning routine, Al went to check the development of a new urban legend online. Ghost Dog of Chicory had it's own web page and a decent following. It even had a Metube channel with a couple of videos that sported several hundred thousand views. Eye witness testimony about the spectral hound created from Tait's scroll grew wilder and more detailed, taking on a life of its own.
With the faint understanding of faith and its associated abilities he had, Al wondered if the fervor created by the incident would actually create a kind of thought form that would continue haunting the area. Over the last couple of weeks, the incident had taken on a somewhat religious overtone. How the spectral hound had chased the kids and one small lady out of the house before wrecking the basement kitchen into exploding, had taken a 'protect the innocent, destroy evil' kind of vibe in the minds and hearts of people.
The only thing that rubbed him the wrong way beyond all the goodness inherent, was how ugly the treatment of one voice among the witness crowd was treated. A fourteen year old girl who lost her mother in the explosion, the one fatal casualty and a 'cook' for the 'kitchen', didn't have anything nice to say about the ghost dog so many others thought greatly of. She was a vocal spokesperson for the 'adversary', quick to point out flaws in other's perception and demonstrate that the incident wasn't some miracle but calculated revenge of some kind.
Despite being labeled cruelly with 'daughter of the devil' style ostracism, it didn't stop her from adding her voice to the narrative. She was cool, logical and had a belly full of hate for whoever was responsible for the death of her mother. She wasn't some idealist and knew what her mother was doing didn't contribute anything good to the world but she loved the woman who had made hard choices to care and provide for her.
Under the guise of shell accounts, he anonymously set up a 2,500 dollar, five year maturity college fund and some department store gift cards sent to her aunt's post office box. There would likely be some additional outpouring of subtle support from others mixed among the hate mail and he hoped his addition would help balance it out. He didn't particularly feel guilt for the girl's loss. It was more an acknowledgment of her pain and validation of her perspective.
It was a valuable lesson for Al, who had lived a rather mundane and mostly sheltered life. There was no black and white when it came to war, no matter the size. When there was loss, there would be victims. A man might be a great scourge but his children or the children of his supporters were no more or less innocent than the children of the 'heroes' lost in taking that scourge down.
There were better and worse ways to do things, however. The 'better' ways in this case, would have possibly ended with Devon being significantly harmed or killed for taking too long or provoking resistance from the enemy. There was a little regret that burned in the back of Al's mind but he didn't feel like he'd done anything he couldn't live with. Regardless, he wouldn't want to test that by meeting that girl or exposing himself to anymore of their personal story than he already had. He didn't trust his logical self to be able to stand firm against the emotional with White's addition to the mix.
Aside from tying up a few small loose ends from his 'explosive' night, Al looked into moving from his city apartment to a more rural area. With urban sprawl creeping its way up to and around local farming communities, it was difficult to find a nice little patch of private country without buying. Going a few more unconventional routes, he finally found a little Heritage Building listing that most home owners wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, nestled into the crook of a nature preserve that even further limited what could be done to and with the property.
5,000 dollars down on a low interest loan, two sneaky uses of the key and a meeting with a member of the Heritage Preservation Committee and he was ready to move in a couple of days. He was also down for a perceived debt of around 20,000 or more in emergency mandatory home repairs that had to match strict guidelines. He was fine with that. Even if the world required his magic to come from within every time unless it was ritual, he could squeeze out an occasional mend between his channels' resting times.
It took some doing and a little more of his once again dwindling account but he set up a work from home arraignment with the clinic and a post office box in another city among other small details. A less intuitive and more deductive reasoning told him that things weren't as calm as they seemed and his own situation would only grow more complicated in the future. He wasn't completely ready yet but he was getting there.
Devon rolled his eyes. "Right... the key is evil. The key is dangerous. The key will eat your souuuul." "No. The key is neutral and uncaring about you. It IS dangerous. And it will eat little bits of everything about you, including your life and souuuul. One little nip at a time. You won't even notice that much until you're FUBAR." Al shot back. Making themselves comfortable, Devon continued, "You know. If I remember right, you told me you didn't know anything about IT. You just kinda knew what it did. All of a sudden, you're an expert." Al said, "I know a little more everyday about all kinds of stuff I didn't before, Devon. Do you have a point?" Deshawn said, "What I think is that you're holding out on us and I wonder how much more would shake out if you were shook up." Al's eyes flickered dimly with an ethereal glow. "Even if I was, in what way is me holding anything from you something I'm not entitled to do? I don't owe you anything." Deshawn chuckled and said, "Don't get it twisted. We just want to step it up. If you got more heat, we want to know so we can do bigger and better things with it." Al said, "I'm not interested in bigger and better things. I'm interested in safety and survivability. The little things Devon did got your boy shot and him minutes away from a long, painful end... And you want to bite off more!? Try handling what you got first. Better yet, get the f*** out of my house and don't show up in front of me again until you know what respect means. I've done nothing but help you and this is what I'm dealing with!?" Deshawn stood up, swaggering to the door. "Don't forget that we know about you... It's alright, Devon. You don't need him. I got you." The young man didn't look so convinced. Whatever power play that Deshawn was trying to pull, it was meant to pull his little brother closer and away from Al. Underneath it all, Devon already knew he'd made a mistake and didn't know how to get out of it. Thinking fast, Devon said, "Brother... Man, look. Did you know where I was and what was happening to me or was it him? Where you been the last few days? You look better than I've seen you in years, man. What the hell are you doing punking Al like that?" The older brother turned to Devon and said, "He don't give a sh*t about you. He just needs a dumb n*gga to do the hard sh*t for him while he sits back here all safe. He said it himself." When Al saw Deshawn start stomping his way, he pulled out the 'ever sharp' blade and pointed it without so much as a tremor at Deshawn's throat. "Leave and we can still be friendly after we both have some time to cool down. Take one more step forward and we won't have that option anymore. Get out." Deshawn shrugged off Devon's hand that was trying to pull him back and turned away after mean mugging Al for all he was worth. "Can you believe this f***ing white dude? He pulled a sword on me. A sword! Who uses a damn sword anymore?" Deshawn's voice reached back to him as Devon's lowered voice tried to talk his brother down. Whatever it was that had let Al stand calmly in front of nearly 300lbs of muscle and barely suppressed rage, left him along with the adrenaline. "I think I need to take exercise a little more seriously. I wasn't designed for this kind of freaking stress," he muttered to himself. Over the next couple of weeks, he'd check on them every once in awhile. They actually weren't doing bad for themselves and Deshawn actually had a lot better control over his actions than Al thought he would. He just about popped a gasket two days after their little tiff when he went to fill his car up only for his card to be denied. By the time he got home to find out what happened, the 300 in his checking account and the 8000 he had in his savings had been removed and returned with a few thousand more added like it was an apology. Grumbling, he backtracked to the gas station and took care of his other business before returning home. The rest of that evening, he went over the things he had seen while spying on them with the key and made some suggestions with detailed layouts. Afterwards he sent it with a scanned PDF attachment of a receipt for paid consultation fees. Towards the end of the second week, he sent another and responded to some of the more insulting criticisms that Deshawn leveled at him. To balance it out, Al admitted that the man was a great deal more level headed than he had originally thought and apologized for his initial view flavored heavily by how they had gotten to know each other. He didn't really feel like offering an olive branch to the the man who had constantly badmouthed him but he recognized that quite a bit of Deshawn's shoulder chip came from misplaced pride. It didn't help that the man came from a background dealing with people who saw things like apologies and compromise as weakness. If the warning that he could see what they were up to mixed with a willingness to bury the hatchet wasn't enough to turn Deshawn around, Al had no problems turning the tables and letting the man see what being an unreasonable prick would get him. A few days later, an event happened that hadn't happened in awhile. One of the low dimensional shadows died. A few, in fact. It only really felt like one because of how they died. They had climbed. Their experience had been nothing like Orison's romp through the abandoned astral home. They wandered in a strange and confusing place, desperately seeking any way back out. In the process, they had ran into and absorbed each other as a result of being drawn to the same 'thin spot'. Out of countless ones that they couldn't sense or lead to certain death, they had found one with a nice coastal scene on the other side. The only problem was, as the newly fused shadow tumbled through the temporary gap in the fabric of reality and past the boundary crossing baptism, he had been too confused and muddleheaded to realize he was falling to his death from a great height in the air. As Al took in the force of their hard earned increase in existence, he felt a sense of difficult to describe melancholy. They had beat the odds long enough to transcend the limit they had started with only to be robbed at the first big milestone's finish line by a cruel twist of coincidence. It was in no way a bad thing for the shadows to live long and productive lives. The more they earned, the more they brought to the joining afterwards. Were they to live on indefinitely, they might find themselves the inheritors rather than the donors but Al had to wonder if that part was actually true. He didn't think it was a coincidence at all that he was the collector but even if the shadows couldn't take over that part, Al wondered if one of the other colors could. If that were true, he wondered if Red would come to 'kill' him under some misguided notion that it would make the survivor 'the one'. He certainly hoped not but, just in case, he was a great deal more generous with Green when sharing what he couldn't safely contain or absorb before useful things were lost. He was slowly getting spiritually stronger and capable of handling more but that was far from a goal Al wanted to embrace. Foreign thoughts and feelings had slowly slipped in and been merging with him the whole time. He felt like he was on the verge of understanding something important but some vital piece of the puzzle was missing. After he had calmed down enough to fall back asleep, Al wondered if people really could die from seeing their death in a falling dream. The lurch his heart went through certainly felt like it held the ability to stop a weak one. A person close to having a heart attack most certainly could trigger one from such a jolt. With that and other grim thoughts gamboling through his head like malicious sheep, he faded back into unremembered dreams. The next day, he woke up with the feeling of melancholy not quite shaken off. After a nice cup of coffee, he felt better, if not completely chipper. When he used Presto to clean the coffee pot and the dishes, he made the discovery that his party favor squirt gun of a magic reserve had graduated to a dollar store water pistol. The magic channels that were sparse and feeble before were still sparse and feeble but stretched throughout his body rather than just a couple of fragile hairs that ran through the very basic head to heart to hand connection. It was just enough for him to start storing a small amount of essence in his body or run the couple of seconds worth of healing ability it took to actually accomplish anything. Whether body essence storage or a couple seconds heal, his channels would need a break afterwards to recover or they very well could 'break'. Two thoughts were born from that realization. Gains from the shadows were almost entirely spiritual or intellectual in nature and anything else was mostly fluke chance. More than ever, he rooted for the ones still struggling to 'make it' for as long as they could. No matter how much he feared too many joining him or sympathized with their plight, he couldn't share gains with them like he could Red and Green. He couldn't even actively reach for their connections in quite the same way. Shaking himself free of those thoughts, he went through his morning routine. Under the new threats introduced into his life, he had decided to step up his exercise game even though he hated every moment of it. No matter how hard he tried to psych himself, every moment he spent doing it felt like a moment he could spend catching up on a web novel or a streaming series. There almost always was some kind of entertaining distraction trying to pull him away from it. It made him feel a little crazy but it was almost like it was his job to grab inspiration, tease meaningful things from games and shows. He could believe there was some truth to that. And if so, he hadn't been doing that job very well. For a person bent on enjoying their life and far too aware of a greater picture, such things had lost a great deal of their appeal but escapism had become a heavily ingrained habit. The desire to procrastinate and relax was an old nemesis stretching back for as far as he could remember. Having completed his morning torture and finishing it off with the catharsis of a hot shower to ease the aches, he checked out his noticeable progress with a flicker of narcissistic delight and posed in front of the mirror. That's when it hit him. There were other progresses that had nothing to do with his newly found fragile discipline. The thinning hair on the top of his head was coming back in but it was much lighter than his own and not the occasional gray one he expected to see. A certain amount of 'extra' noticed in specific areas, that he had written off as the effect of dropping some pounds and getting more in shape, were more than he could justify with such a flimsy excuse anymore. There was a touch too much youthfulness to write off as clean living and the dark green eyes he had always thought of as one of his few redeeming features had a slight splash of blue close to the edge of either eye. A sense of violated invasion washed over him before he got a grip and calmed down. It was a part of the inevitable he had to accept. Despite the slow creep of changes spreading across him, he was still recognizable as himself. And even if he wasn't thrilled about it, other than the eyes, he didn't have a reason to complain from an aesthetic point of view. Somehow, that made him a little angry for reasons he didn't feel comfortable in exploring. Done for the day with a self inspection that would become an obsessive part of his morning routine, Al went to check the development of a new urban legend online. Ghost Dog of Chicory had it's own web page and a decent following. It even had a Metube channel with a couple of videos that sported several hundred thousand views. Eye witness testimony about the spectral hound created from Tait's scroll grew wilder and more detailed, taking on a life of its own. With the faint understanding of faith and its associated abilities he had, Al wondered if the fervor created by the incident would actually create a kind of thought form that would continue haunting the area. Over the last couple of weeks, the incident had taken on a somewhat religious overtone. How the spectral hound had chased the kids and one small lady out of the house before wrecking the basement kitchen into exploding, had taken a 'protect the innocent, destroy evil' kind of vibe in the minds and hearts of people. The only thing that rubbed him the wrong way beyond all the goodness inherent, was how ugly the treatment of one voice among the witness crowd was treated. A fourteen year old girl who lost her mother in the explosion, the one fatal casualty and a 'cook' for the 'kitchen', didn't have anything nice to say about the ghost dog so many others thought greatly of. She was a vocal spokesperson for the 'adversary', quick to point out flaws in other's perception and demonstrate that the incident wasn't some miracle but calculated revenge of some kind. Despite being labeled cruelly with 'daughter of the devil' style ostracism, it didn't stop her from adding her voice to the narrative. She was cool, logical and had a belly full of hate for whoever was responsible for the death of her mother. She wasn't some idealist and knew what her mother was doing didn't contribute anything good to the world but she loved the woman who had made hard choices to care and provide for her. Under the guise of shell accounts, he anonymously set up a 2,500 dollar, five year maturity college fund and some department store gift cards sent to her aunt's post office box. There would likely be some additional outpouring of subtle support from others mixed among the hate mail and he hoped his addition would help balance it out. He didn't particularly feel guilt for the girl's loss. It was more an acknowledgment of her pain and validation of her perspective. It was a valuable lesson for Al, who had lived a rather mundane and mostly sheltered life. There was no black and white when it came to war, no matter the size. When there was loss, there would be victims. A man might be a great scourge but his children or the children of his supporters were no more or less innocent than the children of the 'heroes' lost in taking that scourge down. There were better and worse ways to do things, however. The 'better' ways in this case, would have possibly ended with Devon being significantly harmed or killed for taking too long or provoking resistance from the enemy. There was a little regret that burned in the back of Al's mind but he didn't feel like he'd done anything he couldn't live with. Regardless, he wouldn't want to test that by meeting that girl or exposing himself to anymore of their personal story than he already had. He didn't trust his logical self to be able to stand firm against the emotional with White's addition to the mix. Aside from tying up a few small loose ends from his 'explosive' night, Al looked into moving from his city apartment to a more rural area. With urban sprawl creeping its way up to and around local farming communities, it was difficult to find a nice little patch of private country without buying. Going a few more unconventional routes, he finally found a little Heritage Building listing that most home owners wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, nestled into the crook of a nature preserve that even further limited what could be done to and with the property. 5,000 dollars down on a low interest loan, two sneaky uses of the key and a meeting with a member of the Heritage Preservation Committee and he was ready to move in a couple of days. He was also down for a perceived debt of around 20,000 or more in emergency mandatory home repairs that had to match strict guidelines. He was fine with that. Even if the world required his magic to come from within every time unless it was ritual, he could squeeze out an occasional mend between his channels' resting times. It took some doing and a little more of his once again dwindling account but he set up a work from home arraignment with the clinic and a post office box in another city among other small details. A less intuitive and more deductive reasoning told him that things weren't as calm as they seemed and his own situation would only grow more complicated in the future. He wasn't completely ready yet but he was getting there.
